1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to the field of call centers, and more particularly, this invention relates to the field of call centers having automatic call distributors and interactive voice response units.
2. Description of Related Art
Calls centers that use digital switching systems have become commonplace in businesses and institutions throughout the United States and the world. Often these call systems use separate and functionally different automatic call distributor (ACD) servers and interactive voice response (IVR) servers. The ACD allows routing of calls received via a switch to a plurality of different agents, depending on the predetermined standards defined by the call center system. Examples of these standards include routing based on DNIS or ANI. Some call center systems also have skills based routing on a limited scale.
In these prior art call centers, the IVR script is separately established under one control system, generally run on a processor that is operative and associated with the IVR server. On the other hand, ACD operation is scripted and controlled via a computer and processor that are associated with the ACD, but separate from any association with the IVR server. This is a complicated prior art system, and the lack of integration among any ACD and IVR servers and components makes for complicated call center administration. Additionally, the lack of functional integration among the ACD and IVR components, especially with scripting functions, makes call center set up time consuming, and makes real time reporting of call center operation and agent efficiency difficult. Also, this type of prior art call center system makes agent evaluation and call center evaluation less reliable.
In some prior art call center systems, the user sets up call routing first, and then pushes skills into the call routing. This type of routing and associated scripting is inefficient. Also, many call center systems use proprietary report generation software packages having different prepackaged report templates that cannot be customized with standard office products, such as commercially available SQL or other database products. “Snap shot” reports are thus not available or reliable enough to evaluate a call center performance in any complicated call center system using IVR and ACD servers. Thus, these call center systems are not dynamic, and do not effectively provide service to customers and callers. They also do not respond quickly to changing conditions in a manner to allow adequate real time report generation and the control and tracking of calls within the call center, whether in queue or being responded to by an agent. Any custom applications also are not readily exchangeable across different platforms and are not scalable for different solutions and thus, cannot meet diverse current and future call center demands.